RA4 Help

[Martin Rickards]

I was clearing out what served me as a darkroom and discovered some (very) old paper (Tetanal Work and TT Speed, Kodak Ektacolor Plus F and Supra II, as well as an equally old Tetanal Colortec RA4 2 part 1 litre and a Jessop 2.5 litre with a 4 part developer and a 2 part blix, both in unopened packaging. I likewise found an 8x10 Unicolor drum collecting dust. Amazingly for me, the paper packaging still has my filtration and exposure values. It's tempting to see if these and my Opemus 6 colour enlarger can still do the job or if the paper and chemicals have long since expired.
I calculate that they must be 20 years old and have been stored at room temperature (possibly max of 22ºC). Any idea of how the paper speed and filtration might have drifted over that length of time?
I seem to remember the drum took 100 ml of liquids. As the 1 litre, kit according to the instructions, will process 46 x 10x8s does that mean that the solutions should/can be reused? That's not clear from the instructions.
Pre-soak, stop bath or water rinse?
PS The CD came out looking just like molasses, whereas the Tetanal instructions say the made up developer should be transparent. Even diluted 1:5, it's still pretty dark. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.

 

[RPC]

The Ektacolor Plus was designed for the EP-2 process and will not work in the RA-4 process. The other papers and chemistry would likely be unusable or give very poor results.

 

[EdSawyer]

I have printed a few years ago with Supra II that I bought in the mid-90s. It still worked fine, the base had yellowed quite a bit, so it was hard to get clean color balance overall, and there was some general loss of contrast. FWIW.

 

[mnemosyne]

I was clearing out what served me as a darkroom and discovered some (very) old paper (Tetanal Work and TT Speed, Kodak Ektacolor Plus F and Supra II, as well as an equally old Tetanal Colortec RA4 2 part 1 litre and a Jessop 2.5 litre with a 4 part developer and a 2 part blix, both in unopened packaging. I likewise found an 8x10 Unicolor drum collecting dust. Amazingly for me, the paper packaging still has my filtration and exposure values. It's tempting to see if these and my Opemus 6 colour enlarger can still do the job or if the paper and chemicals have long since expired.
I calculate that they must be 20 years old and have been stored at room temperature (possibly max of 22ºC). Any idea of how the paper speed and filtration might have drifted over that length of time?
I seem to remember the drum took 100 ml of liquids. As the 1 litre, kit according to the instructions, will process 46 x 10x8s does that mean that the solutions should/can be reused? That's not clear from the instructions.
Pre-soak, stop bath or water rinse?
PS The CD came out looking just like molasses, whereas the Tetanal instructions say the made up developer should be transparent. Even diluted 1:5, it's still pretty dark. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.

The CD solution when freshly prepared is a very light amber/straw color. If your CD solution is dark as you describe, then it is definitely oxidized and dead. Blix is also likely to have gone bad unless it was sold as separate concentrates. Get fresh chemistry and save yourself (and us) the trouble. For the RA4 paper, the problem is not color shift (which could be corrected through filtration) but fogging. The base color will not be bright white any more, but more yellow. Of course you can always give it a try and play around with the paper and see if you like the results. On the other hand, definitely get some fresh RA-4 paper to see the difference. The current paper are of very high quality and do not cost an arm and a leg (actually cheaper than b&w paper). So, my advice would be dispose off the old chemistry and buy some fresh RA-4 chemistry and also a box of fresh paper and start having fun.